The retail landscape is in the midst of a dramatic, data-driven renaissance. New tools help to build new connections — between consumers and retailers, and across supply chains. Data analytics and machine learning further these connections to better understand and predict customer behavior and improve demand forecasting. In this emerging era of smart retail, organizations have access to a range of powerful new capabilities and tools.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard that “data-driven companies make more money”. McKinsey started beating that drum half a decade ago. Financial Times wrote extensively about the topic. Google even commissioned a multi-year study from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which showed that “best-in-class digital marketers benefit from 1.4 times greater cost benefits and up to 2.5 times revenue impact” after implementing analytics to drive their business growth.

Great news for all the Elixir alchemists, we’ve just released AppSignal for Elixir package version 1.12.0 which adds support for the upcoming 1.5 version of the Phoenix framework, and improves in-channel error handling. If you’re not an AppSignal user yet, make sure to check out the product tour and see how errors, performance, host metrics and triggers all come together in one tool. Phoenix 1.5 isn’t here yet, but AppSignal 1.12 is ready for it.

As programmers we often have to mentally run code. To imagine how a program will behave given certain inputs. This is hard enough for experienced developers. But for juniors? It can seem impossible. In this article, Melissa Williams argues that pry is an invaluable tool for junior rubyists because it allows them to see exactly what is going on as their code is run.

Application performance is always a concern when building in the modern, competitive web and mobile space. At Scout, it’s why we created application performance monitoring tools in the first place. That said, there are steps you can take to build a more performant application. If you are using Ruby on Rails, caching might be one of the best tools on your belt to build a better application.

We're happy to announce that we've just launched our newly designed dashboard for our logs & metrics platform, allowing DevOps & security professionals to see their vital metrics quicker than ever before. Our team has been keen to respond to the needs of our users through undertaking dedicated research which informed the creation of this latest update to the platform's design. This new design provides improved real-time feedback to users managing & creating new ELK stacks.

Most of the day to day work for knowledge workers is spent helping the business make better decisions, like choosing whether it’s worth expending the effort (or actual money) to achieve the desired business goal. The example I often use when talking about ML is churn prediction (and I’m starting to think I’m overusing it now). It costs money to retain a customer who is thinking of moving, but this is less than the cost of getting new customers.

In February 2017, I was out on a routine training ride when I made a turn on loose gravel. Next thing I knew, I was laying on the pavement. Just like that, I broke my hip and collar bone, and I knew I woudn’t be able to race in the Ironman Lake Placid that year. So, I adjusted from racing to recovery. And, I’m happy to report, I returned to racing in 2019, completing the Ironman Lake Placid that year.

100+ marketers share the SEO competitor analysis tips and tools for understanding your competitor’s strategy and outranking them in search engines.

We are happy to announce the release of Kuma 0.4! This is a major release focused on significantly better observability capabilities that also includes many new features and improvements across the board. This release also marks the 10th release of Kuma since September 2019!